Master Debaters

As a political junkie I used to watch all of the debates. I even watched the Vice Presidential debates including the trainwreck when Al Gore, Dan Quayle and Admiral Stockdale had a three-way debate between some of the dumbest human beings to ever walk this earth. I pretty much stopped watching several election cycles ago, mostly because they are so moronic. Watching two people lie to an audience while calling each other names isn’t all that entertaining.

Needless to say, I didn’t watch the most recent “debate” between Orange Man and Cumala Whorris. I figured it would be a disaster and from what I have heard, I was right. Lies and moronic rantings accompanied by the two “moderators” doing everything they could to trip up Trump and prop up Cumala. To be fair, it sounds like Cumala wasn’t as horrible as most people expected her to be and that seems to be inexplicably helping her in the polls: “Hey, she didn’t come off as a moron quite as much as I expected, she has my vote!” Of course, all of the polling is bullshit and I assume most of the polls aren’t even actually polling anyone, and are just reporting poll results based on whatever they want them to say.

On social media the last couple of days I have seen a lot of people bemoaning how dumb the debates were and wishing we had two better candidates making better points. I understand the sentiment but my comment to most of those lamenting the state of our political discourse was something like this:

If we had two moderately intelligent candidates on stage who had an actual grasp of the issues, like Rand Paul for the Republicans and perhaps Tim Ryan for the Democrats, and if we also had a couple of reasonably neutral and intelligent moderators like Jim Lehrer and if the candidates actually debated on the issues, bringing up facts and presenting policy positions that were argued on their merits….

…how many Americans could have followed the conversation?

I am not trying to be an asshole here; I am quite serious. Would even 10% of registered voters be smart enough and have the basic background knowledge to understand the issues and the points being raised? I am not even talking about a really deep-dive debate between two hard core, think-tank policy wonks, just two moderately intelligent politicians that are reasonably well-versed in the issues. Start talking about the issue of legal immigration and birthright citizenship, getting down in the weeds a little bit, and the vast majority of American voters would start to drool. Get into something deeper like foreign policy and their eyes would roll back into their heads and they would go into convulsions.

We have dimwits throwing feces at each other on stage in lieu of debates because that is all most voters can handle. I personally know a ton of people that are my age or older who have been diligently voting for decades and have very loud political opinions that don’t know a damn thing about policy and couldn’t give an intelligent answer to basic civics questions if you stopped them on the street. The problem with our “democratic” system is that even in a republic, the people choosing those that will represent them are mostly ignorant or flat out stupid and therefore the people chosen to represent them are the sort that appeal to ignorant and/or flat-out stupid voters. There are some fairly intelligent elected officials and even a few that are very bright, but they are the rare exception rather than the rule.

In short, we get the political candidates, political campaigns and political debates that appeal to the majority of voters who are kinda dumb and woefully uninformed. There is no point lamenting the quality of political candidates when the quality of voters is so poor.